Prolog

Silver Whisper's main dining room was never crowded even with the ship at capacity. There were 350 or so revenue passengers and 300+ crew members in this 28,000 ton, 610 foot long ship. Picture taken from my favorite "two top" table, #18, which is at a starboard side window on Deck 4.

Friday - 30 May 2014 - Boulder, Colorado, USA

It's two weeks from the day we arrived home from the month long, two ship cruise journey. As with each of our wonderful trips, there's always some recap to share the lessons learned.

Here's the one for this trip:

1. Planning for two nights in the cruise's embarkation port makes for much less anxiety all around, and it provides for some local exploration and nice meals, even if it's only Fort Lauderdale. I had always done this for distant cruises before, but now I'm convinced it's a good idea for any cruise.

2. Two ship cruises are fun, especially with a couple of nights stay in a new and interesting city between ships, but maybe if there's a next time it should not involve a transit air flight between cruises. Flying spoils the rhythm of the trip and no matter how smooth the flight goes, it's no longer fun to fly.

3. A long cruise is super, but you don't really want a port a day especially on the latter half. We exhausted ourselves exploring just about every stop on this trip. The ship's excursions can never provide the depth of experience that individual exploration can. But you must do a bunch of pre-trip research to get the most out of each stop. Ya get what you "pay" for.

4. Comparing two ships of the same cruise line certainly brings out even modest shortcomings of the  lessor one. The 550 passenger Silver Spirit can not ever come close to the quality of the food and service than even the "only" 382 maximum passenger Silver Whisper provides. The extra 100 or so crew members make for an additional level of bureaucracy, loss of personal attention, and weaknesses creep into the vessel's physical design details. The latter is true at Silversea especially where there was an attempt to design Spirit to be essentially equal in experience in all details. Didn't and couldn't really happen.

5. It's pretty scary when you realize that the wine tasting offerings in Bordeaux's wine museum are no match for the all inclusive daily pours on your cruise ship, and the executive chef is from Bordeaux and knows how to grill a foie gras steak really well.